TALES OF MILITANT CHEMISTRY

The story of the link between film and chemical weapons.

Kodak, the company George Eastman founded, may be best known for its production of film, but it also has a less savory connection: to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. Uranium from the Belgian Congo eventually made its way to the Tennessee Eastman plant in Oak Ridge, near Knoxville, where the company’s Y-12 uranium separation plant made the fuel for the atomic bomb. In this dense academic work, Lovejoy, a media and cultural historian at the University of Minnesota, draws attention to this complicated history and describes “how film factories became poison gas and explosives factories.” She describes the way in which film is made, “an admixture of animal hides and bones, trees, cotton, coal, camphor, salts, and silver,” and how Kodak and its main competitor, Germany’s Agfa, produced chemicals not just for film but also for “synthetic fibers, plastic toys, pesticides, artificial flavors, painkillers, and weapons,” with Agfa also becoming “the nerve center for a network of factories, engines for the Third Reich’s military expansion.” Lovejoy documents the frightening similarities between film and poison gas, especially in the days when film was made from the highly flammable cellulose nitrate. For such a short work, this book covers a lot of ground: the development of chemical weapons; the young women who worked at the Y-12 plant and were unaware of the nature of the products being made; and the dangers of radioactive fallout, particles of which traveled from the Nevada testing site to Kodak’s plant in Rochester, N.Y. This is challenging material, but Lovejoy tells the story well, and she adds intimate if sometimes horrifying details, as when she notes that one of the jobs at Y-12 was to pour caustic soda over wood cellulose, a task that gave some women lung injuries that turned into tuberculosis.

A frightening account of film’s supporting role in the development of atomic weaponry.